As India’s waterways grapple with mounting pollution and the need for smarter maritime solutions grows, Hyderabad-based Eunoia Innovations Private Limited is charting a course at the intersection of both. Founded in 2021, the deep-tech startup develops autonomous marine robotics and Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) for environmental sustainability, hydrographic surveys and maritime defence. Backed by IIT Kanpur SIIC, ISB D-Labs, T-Hub AIC, T-Works, HIIC and VISHVA, it has built three flagship platforms: ‘Aqua Skimmer’, a deployed autonomous clean-up vessel; ‘AquaScanner’, an in-development hydrographic survey USV with RTK-GNSS positioning; and ‘Sentinel-M’, a defence-focused surveillance vessel in the concept stage. With successful deployments across Telangana, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, including an exercise with the Indian Army on the Gomti River, Eunoia is addressing India’s polluted waterways while advancing indigenous maritime technology. The company is led by CEO Alankar Achadian, CTO Anjali Verma, COO Aashish Sharma and chief naval architect E Deepak Cheran. In this conversation with CE, Deepak Cheran discusses the technology, milestones and vision driving Eunoia’s mission to build cleaner, smarter water ecosystems.
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What made you look towards India’s lakes and rivers as the next frontier for autonomous technology?
India has vast water resources and an 11,098.81-km coastline, yet many of its waterbodies remain polluted. While crores have been spent on clean-up drives, we realised the real challenge is affordable, continuous maintenance rather than one-time clean-ups. That’s why we developed the ‘Aqua Skimmer’, India’s first indigenous Automated Surface Vessel (ASV) for water clean-up. Electric-powered, remotely operated within a 3-km range and capable of collecting 150 kg of trash, it is easy to deploy. It also features real-time water-quality monitoring and sample collection, while its fully autonomous version is currently under development.
Was there a defining moment or incident that made you realise polluted water bodies needed a technology-first solution rather than conventional clean-up methods?
Yes, during our early fieldwork at some of the city lakes, we saw municipal workers manually raking out trash from the water using boats and nets, day after day, for the same stretch of lake. Within a week, the trash would build right back up. That’s when it hit us: this wasn’t a manpower problem or a one-time-effort problem, it was a frequency problem. Nobody could afford to put that many people on the water every single day.
What were the biggest technological and financial hurdles you faced in turning a classroom idea into a deployable product?
Technologically, almost nothing for marine robotics was available off the shelf in India, so we designed the hull, propulsion, trash-collection system and electronics from scratch, ensuring they could withstand algae, floating debris, silt and varying water depths. Autonomous navigation on water is far more challenging than on land because obstacles move with the current. Financially, hardware development is capital-intensive and slow, making investors wary of long R&D cycles. We overcame this through government grants, incubation support, and pilot contracts that provided funding and real-world validation.
Can you share a deployment that genuinely surprised or changed your perspective on the impact this technology can have?
One of our early pilots was on a lake in Hyderabad, where a large amount of trash was accumulating at one corner that the conventional water rovers simply couldn’t reach because of their size. Watching the ‘Aqua Skimmer’ manoeuvre into that pocket and clear it out — something the existing municipal machinery had never been able to do — was the moment we realised this wasn’t just an incremental improvement, it was solving a gap the current system couldn’t.
Why did you choose the far more challenging route of building deep-tech hardware from scratch?
Because the problem itself is physical. Trash floating on a lake doesn’t get removed by an app — someone or something has to physically go out, collect it, and bring it back. Software could optimise routes or report pollution levels, but it could never replace the actual act of cleaning. We chose hardware because we wanted to solve the root problem, not just build a dashboard around it. Yes, it’s slower and more capital-intensive, but it’s also far harder to replicate, which is exactly what gives us our long-term edge.
How do you see autonomous robotics changing the way cities manage lakes and rivers over the next decade?
Today, most urban water bodies are managed reactively — clean-up happens only after a lake becomes visibly polluted or a court order forces action.
Over the next decade, I see autonomous vessels becoming a standard part of municipal infrastructure, doing routine, scheduled maintenance the same way garbage trucks handle solid waste. Paired with continuous water-quality monitoring, cities will finally get real-time data to move from reactive clean-up to preventive management, catching pollution spikes before they become a crisis.
Can you elaborate on the products by Eunoia Innovations?
Our flagship product is the ‘Aqua Skimmer’ — an unmanned surface vessel that collects floating trash and monitors water quality in real time. Alongside it, we’ve developed an Unmanned Survey Vessel (USV) used for hydrographic surveys, which we’ve delivered to institutions like the Indian Maritime University (IMU) and Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) which happen to be our first commercial tender. We designed and developed completely indigenous with zero Chinese components within six months marking India’s first USV for Hydrography Survey. We’re also building our Autonomous Navigation System — a vision-and-sensor-based system that lets our vessels navigate, detect obstacles and operate without a human pilot. Together, these form our core platform: unmanned vessels for cleaning, surveying and monitoring water bodies.
We are also working on defence tech to build USV for surveillance, interceptors and supply vessels for naval applications
You eventually wanted to build technologies for environmental conservation as well as defence. How do you balance these two very different missions under one company?
They’re closer than they appear, because at the core, both are about unmanned marine platforms. What differs is the payload and the end use: a trash-collection bin and water-quality sensor for conservation, versus survey and surveillance payloads for defence and maritime security. We’ve already worked with organisations, which lets us build and validate the same core autonomous-vessel technology across both domains, rather than running two disconnected businesses.
What unique advantages do Indian-built autonomous marine systems have compared to global competitors?
Cost and adaptability are our biggest advantages. Being built and engineered in India, our vessels come in at a fraction of the cost of comparable systems from the US or Europe, without compromising on core capability. We’ve also designed and tested the ‘Aqua Skimmer’ directly in Indian conditions — shallow, silty, algae-heavy waterbodies with unpredictable debris — which are far more demanding than the controlled marinas and reservoirs many global systems are built for. A platform proven in that kind of environment travels well to other developing economies facing similar water challenges.
You’ve worked with municipal bodies, NGOs and even the Indian Army. What have these collaborations taught you about building technology for public-sector challenges?
The biggest lesson is that public-sector deployments demand a completely different kind of reliability and simplicity than a lab prototype. Municipal staff and field teams aren’t robotics engineers, so the product has to be nearly fool proof to operate and maintain. We’ve also learned that these collaborations move on a different timeline — procurement, approvals and pilots take far longer than in the private sector, so patience and consistent on-ground support matter as much as the technology itself. Working with entities like GHMC, HMWSSB, the Territorial Army, Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Operations in Jodhpur has taught us to design for real operating conditions, not ideal ones.
Can you tell us about the projects you have worked on?
Apart from the above projects, we also built and delivered India’s first indigenous Unmanned Survey Vessel to the Indian Maritime University and conducted pilot deployments with the Territorial Army. The ‘Aqua Skimmer’ was showcased at Kolkata Climate Week, while our devices in Jodhpur are currently operating daily to remove recurring lake waste.
What’s the roadmap ahead?
Our immediate focus is scaling the fully autonomous version of the ‘Aqua Skimmer’ so it can operate without a human operator, and expanding our municipal pilots into long-term deployment contracts across more Indian cities. Alongside this, we’re developing a bigger version of the ‘Aqua Skimmer’ with a larger collection capacity and range, aimed at bigger lakes, rivers and coastal stretches where the current model reaches its limits.
We’re also scaling our Unmanned Survey Vessel line for hydrography — building on the work we’ve already done with the Indian Maritime University — to serve bathymetric and hydrographic survey needs for ports, inland waterways and research institutions. On the defence side, we’re developing a dedicated Defence USV for maritime security, extending the same autonomy and navigation stack we’ve built for cleaning and survey into surveillance and patrol applications, drawing on our experience working with the Territorial Army.
Longer term, we’re looking at exports to other developing countries facing similar water pollution challenges, and continuing to build out our Autonomous Navigation Vision model so it can be adapted across our full range of platforms. In short, our roadmap is to develop an end-to-end unmanned marine solution spanning sustainability, survey and defence.